Welcome to Office Hours. Today we're talking about the three ways to grow your online art gallery business.

And I'll get into why we landed on that topic. But first, let's look at the schedule and let's see what we're covering. Announcements, as always.

We're gonna be talking about the blog upgrades we've made. Which is, why it's been a few weeks since we've done one of these, if you've noticed. And we'll talk about that. We've recently upgraded most of our themes so I'll show you guys what changes exactly were made. And then finally, the meat of it, the three ways to grow your art business. And, at the end of the course, we'll get into the Q & A.

So throughout this thing if you have any questions come up throw them in the question box and we'll get to them at the end. Let's start with announcements. I think it's mostly the usual stuff here. Let's go through it. But I did see that there are many first timers here, a lot of people tuning in for the first time especially since it's been a little while. So thanks to you guys for checking this out the first time. And, I want to explain what this is for you new guys here. So what is Office Hours? Why should you care? Why are you here? What are we doing with this? These are live webinars just for ASF customers that we run every other week throughout the year. Most of the time, I know we just missed the last one.

But usually, we're pretty consistent every other week. What we do is share updates on the software, of course. And also educate you guys on all of our latest marketing insights, new strategies as they come up. Tactics that we've learned. And then, of course, the Q and A, that's a big part of it. So if you have any marketing related questions throughout the year, we keep our question box open and address all of those questions at once during these sessions. So welcome. An announcement from the Customer Success team. If you're not sure what to do next, or how to stay on the right track, how to make the most of these marketing tactics what you can do is schedule a meeting with them. So they have a system online where you can book an appointment with them. I'll show you guys that now. Let's see. So what you would do and let's go ahead and put this chat box to everybody. You would go to this platform here. It'll pop up for you to confirm your timezone so that all of the bookings are accurate to your timezone. I'm in Central, so I'll select that. And then you just got a calendar here where you can pick a time to have a discussion with the Customer Success team. So let's see, first available the sixth, let's say I'm looking for three PM.

That's when I'm available, so we can't do it here. Let's go to the next day. Oh, and here we can do, let's do 3:15 so you just select your booking. And then you fill out some short information. So we'll do this. We'll do this. Do our phone number. Then what you want to do is go to your site manager URL. So I'm gonna go to my dummy site here that I use to play around with the platform. And just log in. And once you land on your site manager here just grab that URL. That's what they're asking for here, paste that in. A little note here, and then you can add in your note to let them know what you want to talk about ahead of time. I'm having trouble getting new subscribers to my email list. Please help. And now you set up your full booking and it'll confirm for you and you'll be able to talk to those guys. Then you can add this to your calendar and everything like that. If you're not seeing a time that's gonna work for you, the alternative is to just email them. So you can just send an email to success@artstorefronts.com. And you can correspond that way. So make full use of those guys, they're here all day just to help you guys with marketing, with running your site, with setting things up. So reach out to them as you can. Another announcement Labor Day coming up.

Consider running a flash sale. This might be your last chance before the big stretch where we're doing the full run in holiday season of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Christmas, New Year's, I mean it's gonna get really crazy. And this is probably your last chance to do a quick little sale so consider that at least maybe showing up on Monday with a quick 24 hour, 48 hour sale. I just wanted to throw that out there, we don't have a huge strategy for you guys on this but, just something to think about if you think it's the right time for your audience to go ahead and throw out a discount, or whatever it's gonna be. Lastly, like I said earlier, throughout this entire thing we'll leave the question box open there on the left, is something like what it should look like. I know that everyone sees something a little bit different in these things but you should see the questions box. And we're actually monitoring that thing during today's session, so if you need clarification, or help, or you want to be reminded of what we're talking about just say so in that box and someone will get in touch with you there. That's also a great way to throw in questions for the end there. Besides that, if you want to submit questions after this session ends, what you do is you go to officehours.artstorefronts.com. And, this is where you register for the webinars.

And at the top, he giant bar, you'll see, Ask Your Question. And this is where you can thrown in any questions you have throughout the week that you want addressed on Office Hours. All right, that should do it for announcements. Let's get into the blog upgrades. So, this is our excuse for missing one or two of these Office Hours sessions. Is we have just been, and by we, I mean the marketing team here have just been so busy at work migrating the blog to a new platform. The benefits have been half and half, half of the benefits is internal. So just making things easier for us to release the best content that we can. Make it look the best. Make it function the best for you guys. And then the other half is actually external, so stuff that you guys will immediately be able to tell. So I want to walk through really quick what the new blog looks like. I'm pretty excited about it. I don't know if some of you guys noticed, I think we just switched over just earlier this week. But if you land on the blog now you'll see it's a new beautiful widescreen website. A lot of different little aesthetic touches that I really like. We've got the topics right here that you can jump into and I'll show you that in a minute. And one of my favorite parts about what we've done is we've merged the podcast with the blog. So before, the podcast, the art marketing podcast used to be on kind of a separate website. And now, all of that stuff is side-by-side right with the blog posts so you only have to come to the blog to get both of those outlets of content. So on the left here, you'll get recent blog posts. On the right is recent podcast episodes. And then you can just click into these guys for the full list. So yeah, you'll see the podcast is just right in here. And now you can jump in and start listening to all these episodes. Right in the blog. So, I'm happy about that. The other cool thing is that we were inspired, if you guys have seen the Instagram vault, which is one of the customer exclusive resources that we've put together. That rounds up everything to do with Instagram. What we've done is the same thing for a variety of topics here on the public blog, as well. So this is similar to that but excludes some of the stuff that will only be available on the customer versions. But on the blog version here, there's still very helpful.

So if we pop into the Facebook one so you can access these in this area, but also in the header here if you hover on blog it's the same links here for the categories. So here's what these things look like this is the Facebook category page. And what it does is walk you through all of our best Facebook content. Kind of in order of what makes sense to do. So if you're just getting started, before doing anything else, install the Facebook pixels.

So this is like the very beginning. And as the page goes down it goes through more and more advanced techniques. So you can just go up to as far as you think you can handle. You can jump in at whatever point you're at. But you can see here we've got the pixel information. We've got some inspiration on what to post to Facebook. We've got the advertising section which is gonna be huge. If you're new to it. We've got an advanced technique section. And you can just click into all these posts and kind of jump around and get the most out of what we've talked about for Facebook. I'll look at one more here. Let's do, email. So yeah, if you want to ramp up your email marketing this is the best place to do it because it collects both the podcast stuff, and the blog posts. So, it starts with Why why do it at all. And then into building your list with a few different resources for that. Both at art shows and on your website how to build your lists in those places. We've got subject line, tactics, and our thoughts and strategies for crafting great subject lines. We've got the email itself here, both romance emails and sales emails. We've got holiday campaign information. Advanced stuff, again, at the bottom. And then at the very bottom it goes through a list of every single post on the topic that we have. So I hope you guys really like these things, I'm a big fan of 'em, I think they look great. Just, it's easier. You don't have to use the search tool all the time and look through what we have. This really aggregates it all into one place. And of course, we'll be building these out into vaults like the Instagram vault, to include the customer exclusive content over time. Which includes these Office Hours sessions and some of the other tactics that we want to kind of keep to ourselves, and you guys. But for now, these are all publicly available in the blog. So make full use of those, and I hope that these changes to the blog have been worth missing a couple Office Hours. It was a lot of work but, here it is, I think we have a good amount to show for it.

But that's explanation I thought we owed you guys that for why we went away for a little bit. Another thing we've been up to Themes 2.0. Your world just got wider. I couldn't help myself from that one. But let me show you what the new themes are all about. So what have we changed, you may have gotten this update email maybe two days ago, or yesterday. Themes 2.0. What 2.0 is the same themes but upgraded. To make them more modern. The whole deal is that we're obviously so committed as we say all the time to to keeping things as up to date as possible as cutting edge as possible. So 2.0 is a gesture in that. The themes needed upgrading. And, this is what we've done. We've made all of the image areas much larger to keep up with kind of modern website design trends. We've added more room in your nav bar.

This is requested a lot.

And we've made the nav bar a ridealong bar that actually scrolls with you as you go down the page. So let's take a look at back and forth, what those two differences are. So, what we've done is we've provided 2.0 themes for all of the horizontally laid out theme templates. So these are the ones where the nav bar runs left to right long the top. If you have a vertical nav bar on the left side that runs up and down, we haven't 2.0'd those themes. Because we don't really recommend using those themes at all because they don't convert as highly as the horizontal ones. So it's a kind of use at your own peril situation because I know a lot of people can't imagine not using those vertical themes so that's fine. But 2.0 is exclusively for the horizontal themes. So let's compare what they look like. Here is 1.0. And then I'm gonna go to 2.0 here. So it's the same theme. But everything's a little bit bigger. You can see if you've listened to the podcast before there's kind of an Easter egg in one of these images here. But let's look at each of those features one at a time. So, of course, the images here get much larger on the 2.0 version.

I really like that, I think why not use the screen space, especially with a big screen like mine here. It looks a lot nicer to have everything kind of magnified a little bit. And you can also notice on the nav bar here on the 1.0, the FAQ link gets put on a second level of the nav bar. Which we are not a fan of. We don't recommend it. And it actually fits plus some more room in this 2.0 version. So you're able to throw a bunch more links in there. Then if we click into the products themselves you'll see that the product pages took out in the same treatment. The same sort of magnified treatment. All right, so here's the 1.0. And the 2.0. So your images are gonna look much sharper, much clearer. And we've uploaded very low res image here just as a quick sample here for you guys. But you guys are putting in the full resolution images, it's gonna look great. So this will give the shoppers just a much clearer idea, a much closer view of the work. And then that ridealong bar I was talking about, is, I can barely scroll here, but you can see it right away. The nav bar snaps to the top. So instead of just scrolling off the screen as you go down, it pops right there. You'll have your logo clear all over the site. And then they can easily access all of the rest of your nav bar without having to even scroll up. And this just keeps everyone flowing through your site very nicely.

All right, so that's what 2.0 is all about. They're not new themes, they're upgraded to the existing themes. I believe we did it automatically for everyone that's on a horizontal theme. But there is a support article. Right here, that will walk you through if you need to move over to a 2.0 maybe from a vertical nav template this will walk through how to do that. That's what that's all about. I hope you guys enjoy those little subtle upgrades and updates. As always, we're gonna be sending you guys and especially this time, because it's gonna be so many links by the time I'm done with this next part. Right after this thing ends, I'm gonna send you an email with all of the links to all of this stuff so don't worry about that quite yet. So let's get into the meat of it. The three ways to grow your art gallery business. The impotist for this was a question, as usual, from one of you guys. So the question this time was, for someone just getting started with ASF, building their site, and since marketing is a huge endeavor, can you recommend your top three marketing tasks that we should implement right away once the website goes live? And this is always something we hear right, and thanks Stacy for writing in with that. What's the most important stuff, what's the number one most important thing, the top three important things, five, top 10, we hear all of that stuff. Rank them, give it to us, ordered, what do I do first, and what do I do after that? What should I focus on? So what I thought I'd do today is not do that. The thing is is it's impossible to say, what's the number one thing you should focus on because it totally depends on where you're at. Do you have a Facebook account? Do you have an Instagram account? What are you doing on those accounts? Do you have an email list? Is anyone on your email list? The advice completely changes based on who you are and what shape your business is in. But what I can do is narrow that options down and give you guys kind of a framework to think about growth, really.

Because my best advice, when you're asking what should I focus on, is, focus on things that'll impact the growth of your business and not things that don't impact the growth of your business. So a lot of times, especially in the forum or advice you'll see is, is this really affecting your growth? What is this gonna be doing for your company if you're gonna be spending hours on it? We want to steer you guys in the right direction and away from the wrong directions. So let's focus on all of the right directions here. With, what I called, the three ways to grow your art gallery business. The only three ways. So here are three columns we're gonna get into each of them. They each represent one different way that you can grow your business.

And I think all three together represent the only possibilities that exist. Because everything that you could do is in order to increase one of these three things. So these are three elements that you can increase. So I think this will help you guys kind of visualize your path, and hopefully find some focus. So let's dive in. One more thing actually, before I get into this. I'm gonna be throwing out a lot of things in here. These are gonna be ideas. You're not expected, I couldn't even imagine you doing all of them. It would take years. What I want you to do is see which one of these ideas I throw out kind of catches your eye. That seems like something that you could accomplish, something you want to accomplish. Make a note of the name of that idea. And then, like I said, I'll email you afterwards with the links to all of the in depth tutorials to actually doing that idea. So I'm not recommending all of these, I'm saying, here's a bunch of ideas that are all good. Pick a couple, and make projects out of 'em. All right, so three ways, let's start with the first one, the left column. The first thing you could increase to grow your business is to increase the number of customers you have, of course. This is the most obvious one, and this is what most of our content is all about 90% of the time if we're giving you guys tactics, they're to increase your amount of customers.

And that's where we get into romance marketing, right because before you can increase your number of customers, of course, you have to increase your audience. Your audience, being people, both customers, but also largely, people that aren't customers yet, but are fans of what you do. They're keeping an eye on your work whether it's through social, or they're visiting your site or shopping around, or waiting for a sale. Or thinking maybe, Christmas time will make a good gift. That whole audience spectrum of people you got to get those people before you can get customers. It's very very very difficult to go from a stranger to a customer. You want to go from a stranger, to a follower, to a fan. Eventually to a super fan, and then, at the right time, they become a customer. So most of these tips are about increasing your audience. Not necessarily turning strangers into customers immediately. So I know that's sometimes a little disappointing because all of these tips are really about getting you more followers and more fans. But, that is your customer base. Those are future customers. All right, so first off, and like I said, this is stuff we normally talk about. Provide opt-in incentives using the lead capture tools. So make sure as soon as someone hits your website you want to get them on your mailing list. If you get them on the mailing list, you can stay in contact with them. You can romance market to their inbox. You can let them know when you're doing a promotion. You want to be able to reach back out to these people. And, for a lot of people, they just don't want to join your mailing list, they're not interested. So you usually need a little bit on an incentive, a little bit of a push. What we usually recommend is to fire off a quick coupon code for some kind of discount, 10 or 20%, or whatever you're comfortable with. Just to kind of get people on the list and feel like they're getting something in exchange for space in their inbox. I want to show you and what this guys is up to, we feature him a little bit. But he's up to something pretty cool with his lead capture tool. All right, so here's what he's got goin' on. Win a print of your favorite painting.

I'm organizing a draw. The prize is a print of your choice, with this size and this paper type, and all that stuff. All you have to do is put your name and address, email address down there, and pray, good luck. This is so cool because it's not even just a giveaway of a certain print that maybe he has an excess of. You get to pick the print you want. So this is incredibly compelling. If they've gotten this far and clicked onto the website, they're interested in, at least, seeing if they want to buy. So if they're that interested, they'd certainly be interested in the chance to just go ahead and win one. So I think this is very compelling. And then what I love just ramping it up one more step down here, the draw will take place December third, so he's giving a ton of time to leave this offer up, of course. So he can get the most possible email addresses out of it. The name of the winner will be announced on my Facebook fan page. So now he's got 'em over, come to my Facebook page, and like me over there because how else will you know if you won? So I love that there's kind of a second opt-in step that's not required. But he kind of chains that right into the process. So this is a very nicely laid out. It's pretty big, but I think that the value of the offer warrants the actual box being so large. Taking over the screen so much. So whether it's a small discount, or of something crazy like that, provide an opt-in incentive.

Give 'em a reason to give up their email address. And by doing so, you're gonna be racking up a ton of emails which is how you get that engine going where you're sending out your content. Hopefully weekly, as often as you can. And, every one of those, there's a chance that that will be the touch point, the content point that triggers someone to say, you know what? I think I will buy today. I've seen enough, I'm ready. But you gotta get 'em on the list to do that. So, give 'em a reason to jump on your list and increase your customers with opt-in incentives. Let's go into the next one. This kind of folds into what I was just saying, create engaging content. Inspire your audience to form a connection with your work. And your life. This is very important, this is what we've been talking about recently with the Instagram stories type of stuff. Don't think that it's gonna be love at first sight. Right, between the audience and your work. Give 'em a chance to get into it by offering the content, offering stories about how you work, where you work, what inspires you. The story behind a certain painting. All of the regular stuff we're telling you guys to do, it goes a long way towards making an emotional relationship between all of your work, individual pieces. And real people out there that will eventually be inspired to buy something. So just keep that going, as we always say. Direct message your new followers on Instagram. Start a conversation. This, we've been talking about recently too. This is right in there with that create a connection with your work and your life by giving them a chance to actually talk to you. So when they follow you on Instagram, reach out and say, hey, thanks so much. Ask 'em a question, why did you follow me? Where did you find me? The coolest thing, I think, for buyers is to feel like they're not just buying art that visually looks like what they were looking for. But they're buying art from someone they're a fan of. And there's more story to that, there's more value to that.

They feel like they're supporting you as an artist. This is a great way to do that, make yourself more accessible than you have in the past. Reach out and direct message new followers. Remarketing ads, of course. Anyone that visits your website sees an ad later on. And that ad should just be advertising new content. Showing off new images. That sort of romance stuff we always talk about. But that's a great way to make sure that you're always top of mind with people that have landed on your website. And the last tip here, to increase market customers, properly run holiday promotions. Right hook when the time is right, like we say. And follow our holiday guides. So holiday promotions, at least on the big ones whenever everyone expects it because you really don't know. You have this audience building. You don't really know how many of them aren't never going to buy until there's some kind of deal. I know that that's not what you guys are aspiring to do, you want to be able to demand any price. But in the meantime, you might have people just sitting there, looking at every one of your Instagram stories and reading your emails. And in their head they're blocking out holiday season, I'm getting something.

And that might be the only time they're gonna buy, so make sure you actually run these holiday promotions to give those people a chance to buy. A lot of that art demand is sucked up just in the holiday season. Tons of people are cooking on your art. Lovin' it all year, and just waiting for November/December. So yeah, run 'em properly. Follow our holiday guides, we're gonna be doing a lot of work on that this year to expand our guides with even more detailed information on how to run the promotions. What emails to send, and how to do the full roll out and how long to run your promotions.

And what to offer as different promotions, discounts. We're gonna get into all that, so stay tuned for that. But, if you want to increase your customers that's the way to do it. Because, as you know, as soon as someone spends money on something once it really opens the door to do it again. So you do want to activate some of those customers during the holiday time. With a promotion that gets them in at a lower cost to them and from then on, you can go forward and get more sales from them, and we'll get into that later in this very webinar. So I think those cover my favorite techniques, my top ones for increasing the number of customers that you have. But that's actually not the only way to grow your business.

You can grow your business without increasing your customers given that you have a good amount to start with. But you don't always need to just do stuff that gives you more customers. So let's go into the second way to grow your art gallery business. And that's to increase your average order value. So instead of looking at more customers you're looking at, how can I get more from every single order? And then, if you do this, if you increase your average order value, think about it, you could grow your business without adding any customers at all. So if you have 10 customers if you get all of them to spend more on average it's the same as adding an additional customer. So let's look at tactics that work just to increase average order value. And we'll start by just how you calculate that. Very simple, divide your revenue by the total number of your orders. And that'll give you the average value of all of those orders. So how do you increase that number?

The first thing you could do is offer frames. Looking at the data from artstorefront customers here frames are part of a purchase for 15 to 20% of all the orders that go down on our platform. Fifteen to 20%. So if you're not offering frames at all, you're not part of the 15 to 20% that's getting their order value bumped up every time by people that are also buying a frame when they're buying the art. So one of the best things you can do to increase the value of every order is to give them that add on, the frame option. And to make full use of our live framing tool which I think is a great way to sell the frames because they can picture it, they can pick out all the frames. So look into that, I'll send you more information on that after this webinar if you're not sure how to get started with frames. But that's easy money left on the table.

All you gotta do is make it an option and, like we said, 15 to 20% of orders are choosing to spend that extra money to get it framed. Right along the same line, expand your media types. Make sure you're offering as many as you think is wise. But consider bumping it up because people get certain media type in their head, that's what they're looking for. And if you don't offer it, you don't win that sale. So whether that's metal, different types of paper. Just make sure that you have a robust selection of media types, and that you fully describe them using the description area of your media types. Just so that you're not losing any sales for as dumb a reason as you just don't offer the type, when you could. So that's another good way to bump it up and to not lose out on any sales. Probably the biggest one, when it works, is to offer the multi-panel art wall product. This thing is just killing it for people that are able to sell them. We did a new feature write up on this that I'll link to you guys later.

That explains what this is. It's basically a cluster of panels that create kind of a seamless image. And this is perfect for people who want to fill a huge spot on their wall.

And instead of buying one giant piece they get to buy three separate pieces that create this awesome cluster effect. This is very visually intriguing. And what you get is that you sell three pieces instead of one. So this is literally three Xing the order value for people that are offering the multi panel art wall. It's really incredible, you can see some more examples here of how you can arrange all sorts of different layouts of these images. Really cool and creative stuff. I think they're very buyable for people that need to fill that spot behind their couch or whatever, a huge accent wall in their office. Or whatever it is. If they're looking for a giant piece this will really surprise them and give them a better idea than they probably thought of going into shopping for that huge piece. So make sure you're offering that, people are, like I said, three Xing the orders by selling three pieces for someone who was only intending to buy one. The next thing, this can be very powerful, set a free shipping or discount threshold. And use your existing average order value to figure out where you should set this threshold at. So let me pull up a calculator. Let's get into this. So, what I would recommend first, figure out your AOV. So let's say your revenue is $10,000 for a certain period of time.

And that was the result of six orders. So your AOV is $1,666. That's the average order value at your current place. And you want to up that. You want to increase that. So, with this method, let's say we're gonna offer free shipping if you spend a certain amount. Take your average order value. And figure out what percent you want to increase it by that still makes offering free shipping worth it. So let's say that's 20%. So let's multiply your current AOV by 20%. That's $333. So if you want to increase by 20%, 333 bucks. Add that to your AOV. All right, so this is the new number. This is what I would set your threshold at. Does that make sense? So what I would say, you want to increase your AOV from $1,600. You want to increase it by 20%. So, say on your site, spend $2,000 get free shipping. Right? So you don't want to offer free shipping too close to your AOV 'cause that wouldn't increase it, you're losing out on the money that's going to the free shipping. Alternatively, spend $2,000, get 5% off. Or, make sure the math works out. But that's what I would do. Multiply it by 20, 30, or 40%. Whatever you're trying to increase I would maybe staircase it. Go a little bit at a time to make sure that the actual tactic's working.

But that's a good way to figure out math for when free shipping could be worth it because you see that on e-commerce sites all over. And they've calculated that number because it's just above their AOV. So if a site normally sells $79 an order they might do $99 to get free shipping. And, the psychology of it is that people typically value free shipping a little bit more than just a flat discount because no one wants to pay for shipping, it's such an extra cost. They want to pay for the thing that they're getting, they don't want to pay to get the thing to them. So a lot of times you can get further offering just free shipping than a discount that would exceed the value of free shipping. So I know that for a lot of large pieces this doesn't make sense. You can set it up, I'll send you the link for how to work with coupons. But you could set it up for certain media types and things like that. But, if it makes sense for you, I think it's a great way to target a nice increase to your average order value by getting everyone to spend more to make sure they get that free shipping unlocked. I hope that makes sense, I can recover that. I know that that one got a little technical. Let's go to one more here for increasing your average order value. The same type of thing as last time, offer items at different price points to give people ways to stack up an order with more than one item.

Or to get to a point where they can afford it. Maybe they're gonna buy one piece but then they see that you do offer lower quality prints that would be perfect as a gift for their niece, or something like that. So they tack that on, figure, while I'm here getting a beautiful print for my office, I would love to get my Christmas gifts out of the way and I see that they do have a lower cost item for a smaller print that I can get for someone's desk, or whatever it is. But just make sure you have a range of price points available on your site so that people are able to stack together multiple orders without having to spend twice as much to get two items. Every item shouldn't have to double their price, they should be able to spend $1,000 and they should be able to spend $100. However it works out with what you do offer, we have some ideas around the site or on the blog for other items that sell really well. I'll link to that, as well. But look into that, make sure that people are able to bundle together more items because if they're buying more, that's your average order value.

Okay. Let's get into the third and final way.

I'm gonna take it slow a little bit here 'cause these are a lot of ideas. Like I said, pick, if any of these sound like they're good for your particular situation, make a note. I'll send you all the details afterwards for how to actually pull these things off. But these aren't things that you would do all of them, you would just do one of them at a time. All right, let's get into the last way. Increase average order frequency. So this is an alternative to the middle one, instead of trying to increase the average order value, you don't have to increase that if you get those people to buy more often. It's basically the same idea, right. Once a month, for $100 or twice a month for $50, is the same thing. You can increase either of those ends in different ways. So let's look at the frequency end. So you don't need them to buy more, just more often. The best way to do that is to remarket to your customer list separate from the remarketing that you're sending to everyone else. So we've done podcast episodes on this. This is the cold, warm and hot traffic idea. And we also covered this on the very last webinar number 15. Send separate messaging to customers that have already made a purchase than you do to people that have not yet made a purchase. And we'll show you how to do this but it's pretty simple you just have to bring your customer list into Facebook as an audience. This is a great way to inspire repeat purchases because you can reach back out to them and talk to them as customers. You don't have to go quite as romancing as you do with brand new people. You can cut to the chase a little bit more. And reach out to them, even give them steeper better promotions, or worse promotions. You can totally communicate with them separately and I think you should. And kind of work up the strategies yourself of what you want your existing customers to know about. Maybe you don't want them to know about promotions at all. There's all sorts of different ways that you can do it. But keep that in mind that you don't have to talk to everyone the exact same way and that you do have the ability to email your customers separately and to remarket on Facebook and Instagram separately. Another great way to increase the average order frequency is to be completely consistent with your publishing so that people just don't forget about you. So the more that you're posting, and I'll go right into the next one because this is all about Instagram stories.

Most recently, as kind of the hottest way to stay in touch with everyone. Just be consistent about it. Don't miss any time, don't go away. Make sure that whenever they're ready to purchase on that week that they're thinking maybe it's time to buy something they see your art somewhere across all of their channels, their inbox, their Instagram, their Facebook. Make sure that you're there because someone else will be there otherwise. And along with Instagram stories use stories to show your work in progress and then don't forget to update when that work that you were working on is available to buy. If you show your progress on a certain piece over the course of weeks, however long it takes you to complete, and you're updating with these little clips that you're posting to your story. Showing the process of preparing your canvas, whatever it is, your equipment that you've gotten for this. The sketching phase. If you're doing all of this great work to get everyone rigged in and very attached to this piece, then they're getting to see it come to life before them, don't forget the final step. It's up, it's ready to buy. And that's when you would finally offer a link to your site in the previous part. The previous days you were just showing off that romance content. So show off your work, get people into it following your progress and then send out an update when it's available. It might just be someone that loves that piece and feels that connection that they got to see how it was made and it means a lot more to them for that. Same thing with photos, this can totally work for photographers because you're showing yourself on location. And then they get to finally purchase that finished work. That's a great technique to make sure that again, when someone has the money to spend they get to spend it on you because you're putting yourself out there often enough.

A great way to make sure that people purchase not just more than once, but often, is to create collectable works. So just think about, on the creative end, how can you create series that are collectable?

Maybe that's by theme. Maybe that's work that has a similar aesthetic that people would be interested in putting in multiple rooms, or multiple pieces in the same room. Just have that in your mind is, if every single piece is different, people have to be in the mood to buy a completely different piece. But if you do make these kind of series that are somewhat collectible, or have some kind of through line. Maybe they're photos that are in the same style or of the same location. Maybe they're paintings that are with the same color palette. All that sort of creative stuff that you can do to make people inspired to purchase more than one piece. And maybe that's an ongoing project for them is they collect more and more. Definitely something to think about. And right along with that, limited edition prints generate some hype with scarcity. It is artificial scarcity, but you see this non-stop with extremely successful artists that run these limited edition series. So it's always the question of like, why the hell is it limited? You can just print as many as you could possibly sell. But they're actually selling more by the hype that's created that it's only available for a certain amount of time, a certain number of them. So you'll see these all the time like, I'm gonna do 500 prints of my latest photo. I only release one new print per month, or whatever it is. And the math for those artists has worked out. So rather than having an open floodgate system where they sell unlimited quantities, they actually make more money by doing these artificial limited edition runs. Maybe they hand number them to kind of increase the value to people and make it feel more special. But all the people that miss out that don't get that limited edition, they don't get in on time, they're lining up for the next one to make sure that they don't make the same mistake again. So again, this isn't blanket advice, I don't recommend every single artist and photographer does this. But if this seems right for your audience and your work, think of it, consider it. It could work out pretty well for you. And our latest update, we just recently installed the ability to set this up, basically. So to define the number of items that your site can sell. And it gives a live update to everyone of how many are left. And then when it goes down to zero, it changes to sold out and it can no longer be purchased. So this is a great way to make use of that recent upgrade to the software. But definitely consider that, I think that that's a really fun way to get people involved. And like I said, it's not even really about the first time, it's about people feeling bad for missing it and then lining up for that next time and just climbing the hype staircase from there as more and more people want to get in on it. And if you combine that with collectible content, subject matter, then it can really get crazy. If you get someone that wants to collect your work but they can only do it if they buy it on the first day or whatever, I mean, that's really hyping up the interest in making a purchase. And making frequent purchases. Increasing your frequency.

All right, so those are the three ways, I think everything else that you could think of also kid of falls into one of these three tiers. You can increase your customers. You can increase your average order value. Or you can increase your average order frequency. And those are some of my favorite ways to do it. I think the overall advice is to pick a lane. Right, you don't have to pick between the three of these, but mainly what I mean is, make one of those items I talked about today a project. And don't move on 'til you complete that project. Because I see, all the time, from a lot of you guys tip toeing into different things. And then, something else catches your eye and you didn't really set up the other thing well enough to perform. Don't do that. Pick one of these things. Like I said, you've got a good amount of time before we get into the holiday season.

You've got another month. Not a ton of time. But, it's gonna be a busy last quarter of the year, for sure, we're gonna be filling you guys with all the advice that you can take. But you got a month until then so make a project out of one of these things, get it up and running. Try one, two, or three of these things. Whatever seems to work for you. Because, every single one of them is totally beneficial, that's why it's brought up today. So you can't really go wrong even picking one of these at random. But, pick out one that you're into and stick to it and don't forget that consistency is the absolute king of marketing. Every marketing successes come from a decent idea that was implemented consistently. It wasn't given up on, it wasn't half done. So that's my ultimate advice. Whatever way that you do choose to build your business, because all three of these are as good as the others, is just about what's more effective for your situation. Whatever one you do land on stick to it and see through it to the end. And I think that right now is a great time like I said, you do have time for it right now. Let's get into some Q and A. This is your time, throw questions in the box if you've got 'em. I'm gonna go to the pre-submitted questions via that box on the Office Hours site that I talked about earlier. First one's from Katie. She asks, do you have an opinion on watermarking photos of your work posted to Instagram? I notice most people don't do it. I'm not overly worried about someone stealing the image, but more interested in people seeing my name on it. In Instagram world, is it considered gauche? My opinion, since you asked for it, is to not watermark the photos. Or, to watermark it very small in the corner. But I wouldn't really watermark them at all. I don't think that, as you said, I don't think it's standard. I don't think most people do it. So, I don't think you want to stand out in that way.

The Instagram resolution is so low that you shouldn't worry about anyone stealing the image. There's barely anything they could do.

They could just save it to their phone, really. But, the quality isn't so great on Instagram it's just good enough for that one location, just the Instagram mobile feed. So I wouldn't worry about that. I would not watermark them. And if you want your name attached to them, it is right above every single one of your images is your account name. So if you have that as your real name or your business name it is riding along with all of your posts. So my opinion is, don't watermark 'em. Make sure it's as accessible as possible. And that means, not covering up any of your image. And making them very viewable. That's where I would go. We do have a post coming up on this for watermarking in all situations. Including, when you are posting high resolution images around the web. So we'll share our thought on what to do in that situation. Along with some advice on how to find, if anyone has stolen your image. But in particular on Instagram, like I said, it's so low res any way. I think just go with what is standard which is to not watermark. Philip, any suggestions on building Instagram following? I seem to lose more followers every day than I gain. I would have to check out your Instagram to see what exactly the problem is if you're losing followers. I would make sure first both ends of it, the positive and negative. Make sure you are following everything that we recommend, especially making use of stories and hash tags. And then make sure you're not doing anything that we don't recommend. So look at your frequency.

Maybe you're posting too often for people. Maybe you're posting too many in a row. Maybe you're posting five images at a go. I wouldn't recommend that. So look at your posting frequency. Look at your subject matter. Maybe you're not posting the content people want to see. And, try to identify any problem areas and also any areas you could do better on. Maybe you could make more use of stories. Or hash tags, maybe the hash tags you're using aren't really representing what you typically post. So people follow you at first, because they thought it was gonna be one thing and they quickly see it's not. Just kind of evaluate yourself and figure out. And also, make full use, lean on what other people are doing, for sure. Look at other people in your niche. And make sure that you're not doing anything they're not doing. If you see these people becoming very successful in getting tens of thousands of followers, and everything. Make sure you're copying the type of stuff that they're doing, but with your own work. So kind of a vague answer but both ends, don't do anything that other people aren't doing. And, do everything that we're recommending. And then hopefully, report back to us, Submit another question with more details if you're finding any more specific problems. But that's kind of the general answer. Sarah, from Galaxy Paintings, maybe I'm just being impatient, but I'm having a hard time capturing emails from my newsletter. Even though I have offered a discount for new customers. And I changed the wording. Starting in September, I plan to do an art print raffle giveaway.

That's like what I talked about earlier. Is there a better way to capture emails? What am I doing wrong? Or are people just sick of giving out their email address? People are sick of giving out their email address, in general, that's why, you're on the right track with the opt-in incentive. I looked into your particular situation with your stats, and everything like that. I think that your contact conversion rate, the percentage of people that are opting into your email list is half of what it should be. But not terrible. It's just half of what it should be you should be able to double it.

It's not a tenth of what it should be. It's just half. However, you don't have enough traffic to truly decide it's not working yet. Focus on generating more traffic and once you've quadrupled your traffic, report back. And if it's still half of what it should be then you have a problem. For now, I just don't think it's enough sample size to truly determine if anything is wrong. But I did look at your newsletter opt-in. I think you might have removed the discount, I'd put that back, make sure there is an incentive. And give it some more time and some more to your sample size. Because there's just not enough people right now to make a hard determination that something's wrong.

So just follow the advice earlier, I think that that print raffle giveaway is a great idea. Make sure you run it for a good amount of time so that you get as much value as you can out of that.

I would run it for a couple months. But you're on the right track, just stick to it. And check back in with us when you have maybe tripled your traffic levels. And we'll see, at that point, if we can determine that something's definitely wrong. But just stick to it, for sure. And that brings us to the end here. So if you guys have any last minute questions I'll take them now, Otherwise, thank you so much for tuning in. Stay tuned for the email with links to every single idea that I threw out today. You can pick the one you're into and read all about how to do it.

So I think that those are the real tactics. Hope that those ideas were inspiring to you guys, and gives you a little bit of focus when it comes to, what should I do, what do you recommend, what's the top three things, and stuff like that. There is no top three but it would be some combination of all those ideas I threw out based on where you're at. So hopefully you can self-identify where you're at and what would be the right move for you and then get that email. And like I said, make a project out of one of these things and on the next two Office Hours from now I hope that you'll be already seeing the benefits from one of these things because they're all, I think, really great ideas.

I think they're all effective. So thanks so much. We will see you guys next time. The blog updates are done so we will be on schedule with the next Office Hours in two weeks from today. Go ahead and get registered for that as soon as you can. Submit your questions ahead of time so I have a good amount of time to respond to them. And we'll see you then, thanks again for coming.